Description of the phenomenon	Examples
1.c.Dental variants of alveolar consonants before the interdental /Ѳ/,/ /	a. quarrel, quiet, twinkle, dwell Stop worrying, not once, meet Wendy, Tony’s wife, please wait, this weather
2.g. Consonant clusters with the sonorant /r/: tr, dr, pr, fr, gr, br, kr, Ѳr	b. father-in-law, dead or alive, partner and colleague, a pair of jeans, for instance, a letter of complaint, after all A liar ought to have a good memory.
3.a. Labialized consonants before the bilabial sonorant /w/: tw, kw, sw,dw, gw	c. the seventh, in the morning, filthy, at the back He was thirty yesterday. She likes this author immensely. He supports these theological theories.
4. f. Retaining the place of articulation of adjacent consonants	d. the artist, to envy, very often, to invent, pretty awful, bluish, trying, two empty boxes
5. b. Linking ‘r’	e. an end, an hour, the first of January, an actress, he’s older, not always, his aunt It’s almost late, It’s all right.
6. e. Consonant + Vowel word junctures (CV)	f. part of the time, most of them, at the end of the street, a piece of wood, a bottle of wine Have we got any time left?
7.d. Two adjacent vowels in a word and in a word and at a word boundary (VV)	g. frown, proud, drowsy, tricky, best reason The London-York route, Those people were easy to recruit.

Match the phonetic phenomena with the examples. Practice good reading.

Palatalization - pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate.

When I am ten

I’ll get a pen

Then I shall write

Like brother Ben.

Give your own examples.

Aspiration

strong (long vowels, diphthongs)	weak (short vowels, unstressed vowels)	absence of aspiration
Peter /pi:tǝ/	carpet /ka:pIt/	S /p/ S /t/ /k/ stop

/tn/ - /dn/ - Nasal plosion.

/'kitn/ - kitten

/'mitn/ - mitten

/'bi:tn/ - beaten

Vowel length – phonetic phenomenon

1. Very long – at the end of the word (bee – bi:)

2. long – vowel + voiced consonant (seed – si:d)

3. short – vowel + voiceless consonant (seat – si:t)

be – bid – bit

Syllabling

Syllables can be of one/some sounds, equal a word (“I” [ai], 10 [ten]) or word part as in “sofa” ['sәu-fә]. English vowels and sonants are syllable-building. Often syllables are built with the [l], [n] sonants, sometimes [m] as in ['litl], ['se:tn], ['riðm]. They build syllables when apart from syllable-building vowels via a consonant sound, i.e. when not bordering vowels.

Close type of syllable (1)

a /æ/, e /e/, i /I/, y /I/, o /o/, u /^/, i: /e/

VC(C) bad, rock

VCCV(C)

Open type of syllable (2)

a /eI/, e /i:/, i /aI/, y /aI/, o /ǝu/, u /ju:/, i: /aI/

CV he, me

CVCV name, rosy

Intonation /Intǝ’neIʃn/

• is variation of pitch, loudness, tempo and timbre /’tæmbrǝ/ of the voice.

Communicative functions:

• delimits utterances in the speech flow

• shows the speaker’s attitude

• indicates the communicative type (a statement, a question, an imperative, an exclamation)

Intonation can add deeper meaning to a word.

Intonation is just as important as the way a word is pronounced.

Aspiration

The voiceless plosive [p], [t], [k] consonants are pronounced with aspiration like with some exhalation noise right after voiceless consonants. This weak exhalation comes from air friction with the closing vocal cords to remind the [h] consonant sound – [p^h], [t^h], [k^h]. In forming syllables starting with [p], [t], [k], vowels are pronounced after a pause as in [k^hil], [k^hi:l], not right after these consonants.

Aspiration Loss

[p], [t], [k] lose aspiration after the constrictive voiceless [s] consonant as in [spi:k]. Voiceless plosive consonants are pronounced without aspiration in unstressed syllables as in “potato, tobacco”.

Palatalization

This consonant softening happens after raising the tongue’s middle part to the hard palate.

English consonant pronunciation is hard, not palatalized. However before front-row vowels like [i], [i:], [iә], [e], [ei] consonants may take on an undesirable palatalization shade. To avoid mistaken palatalization, pronounce a consonant and vowel apart, slightly holding vowel articulation start not to raise the tongue’s middle part to the palate in pronouncing a consonant as in [s-in], [l-es].

Assimilation

Speech sounds affect each other so that neighboring sounds can take on their features. Assimilation is quality likening between neighboring consonant sounds.

In progressive assimilation the 1st sound affects the following one like in voiceless consonant and sonant combinations where the sonant becomes devoiced as in [pj]-“piano”, [kl]-“clear”, [sw]-“sweet”.

In regressive assimilation the 2nd sound affects the previous one like apical alveolar sounds before interdentals becoming interdental too as in [tθ], [nð].

In reciprocal assimilation both sounds affect each other. In the [tw] combination the [t] consonant becomes lipped while the [w] sonant is pronounced with a devoiced start. In [tr] the apical alveolar [t] is pronounced as a cacuminal sound while the [r] sonant becomes semi-devoiced.

Plosion Loss

Speech sounds are seldom pronounced isolatedly but join in words/phrases. Linking sounds in/between words follows certain rules. The previous sound’s plosion links to the next sound’s closure, thus making up joint sound pronunciation in speech. It happens differently depending on sound type.

This way 2 plosive consonants of the same formation place like [-pb-] in the word combinations “cheap book” or [-dd-] in “midday” are pronounced without the 1st consonant’s plosion. The 1st consonant has the 1st 2 stages while the 2nd consonant has the 3rd stage. So the combination sounds with double consonant plosion.